Judi
Bari Web Site of the Redwood Summer Justice Project

Overview of the Earth First! Bombing Case

Who Bombed Judi Bari?November 1997

When Earth First! activists Judi
Bari and Darryl Cherney first filed their civil rights lawsuit against
the FBI and Oakland Police Department in 1991, they were told a suit of
this kind would take ten years to come to trial. Now, mid-way through year
number seven, the case has gone through four name changes, two different
judges and an appellate court decision. It has survived repeated attempts
by the defendants to have the case thrown out, and unearthed thousands
of pages of FBI files and police documents. The result is documented proof
of a covert operation in 1990 against Earth First! that used the tactics
of the FBI's notorious Counterintelligence Program (COINTELPRO). The FBI
claims that COINTELPRO was discontinued in 1975, after a congressional
investigation found it involved massive violations of constitutional rights.

THE BOMBING

Just before noon on May 24th, 1990,
a pipe bomb exploded beneath labor/environmental organizer Judi Bari's
driver's seat as she and fellow activist Darryl Cherney drove through Oakland
on their way to an organizing event in Santa Cruz. Judi and Darryl were
the two most prominent organizers for Earth First! Redwood Summer, a planned
summer-long campaign of non-violent protests in defense of California's
North Coast redwood forests. In the weeks prior to the bombing, Judi, Darryl
and other Earth First! organizers received numerous and increasingly scary
death threats focused on their involvement in the redwood struggle.

The bomb was hidden under the driver's
seat and triggered by a motion device, clearly a politically motivated
assassination attempt. Even so, the FBI appeared on the scene within 15
minutes of the blast and seized on the attack to attempt to portray Judi
and Darryl as bombers and "neutralize" their EF! organizing. Aided by the
Oakland Police and in contradiction to the physical evidence, the FBI declared
that the activists had been knowingly transporting the bomb on the back
seat floor board of the car, and that it had exploded accidentally. According
to Oakland police testimony, the FBI told them at the scene that Judi and
Darryl, two non-violent activists, were "the type of individuals who would
be involved in transporting explosives; bombs."

The Oakland Police placed Judi under
arrest just three hours after the blast as she struggled for her life in
the hospital. Her back was broken and her pelvis shattered by the bomb
that left her permanently disabled and in constant pain until her death
March 2, 1997, of breast cancer. Darryl was arrested within twelve hours.
The two became the focus of an FBI smear campaign that resulted in nationwide
headlines declaring the activists guilty of transporting the bomb that
had been used to try to kill them. After seven weeks, the Alameda County
District Attorney declined to press charges; there was simply no evidence.
To this day, no legitimate investigation has ever been conducted and the
bombers remain at large.

THE CIVIL RIGHTS LAWSUIT

Knowing that such violence and government
repression would only increase if left unchallenged, Judi Bari and Darryl
Cherney filed suit against the FBI and OPD in May of 1991, charging them
with false arrest and civil rights violations. The federal lawsuit claims
that the FBI and Oakland police knew well that Judi and Darryl were innocent,
and that they were in fact the intended targets of a brutal assassination
attempt. But instead of treating it as such, the FBI launched a plan to
discredit Earth First! and Judi and Darryl as organizers, in order to "neutralize"
the burgeoning forest protection movement.

THE FRAME-UP

Through the lawsuit's discovery process,
we have gotten access to the FBI's and OPD's own documents, including striking
police photos of the bombed out car that shows beyond a shadow of a doubt
that the bomb was hidden beneath the seat, and the FBI knew it. The files
document the series of blatant lies told by the FBI and Oakland Police
from the first moments after the blast.

LIE # 1: The search warrant states
that the FBI claims that the bomb "was on the floor board behind the driver's
seat when it detonated." This is disproved by the police's own crime scene
photos, which clearly show the hole in the car's floorboard to be centered
under the driver's seat, and the back seat still intact. Also, the FBI's
own bomb expert from the lab in D.C., SSA David R. Williams, has confirmed
that the bomb was hidden under the driver's seat, and that this would have
been obvious from the damage to the car.

LIE # 2: The search warrant also
quotes the FBI as saying that "a separate bag of nails was discovered in
the vehicle that are identical to the nails taped to the explosive device."
In fact, the nails taped to the bomb were finishing nails; while the nails
found in two bags in the car were roofing nails and sinkers, quite different
to the naked eye from the nails in the bomb.

LIE # 3: FBI lab bomb expert SSA
Williams has also testified that the bomb was triggered by a motion device,
consisting of a large ball bearing that had to roll to connect two contact
points. The fact that the bomb was hidden under the car seat and triggered
by the motion of the car certainly undermines FBI/OPD claims that a reasonable
officer could have thought Judi and Darryl were anything but the intended
targets of the bomb.

LIE # 4. In the warrant for a groundless
second search of Judi's home one month after the bombing, Oakland police
claim they were told by FBI lab expert SSA Williams that nails were found
in the house that matched nails in the bomb "in a batch of 200-1,000 nails."
SSA Williams has testified that he never said that, and in fact nails are
made in batches of millions, and cannot be matched on that scale.

THE BOGUS INVESTIGATION

The files also document the FBI's bogus
investigation of the bombing, as page after page reveals that they used
this case as an excuse to conduct a far reaching campaign of political
intelligence gathering on environmentalists, both locally and nationally.
Meanwhile the FBI failed to follow up on significant leads that indicate
the bombing was an assassination attempt, plotted in retaliation for Judi
and Darryl's organizing activities. For instance, the death threats Judi
had received before the bombing were never investigated or even sent to
the FBI lab for analysis.

FBI BOMB SCHOOL

The most outrageous revelations about
be FBI involvement in the bombing case have come in more recent discovery
documents. Through deposition testimony, we found out an FBI "bomb school"
was held in Eureka, California, just one month before Judi and Darryl were
bombed in Oakland. During the week-long Bomb Investigators Training Course,
the FBI blew up cars with pipe bombs and practiced responding. The teacher
at bomb school was Special Agent Frank Doyle, the very same FBI bomb expert
who showed up at the scene one month later in Oakland and supervised the
collection of evidence. SA Doyle is credited with the pronouncement that
the bomb was visible in the back seat.

Another FBI lie was uncovered when
the defendants were forced to unredact previously blacked-out passages
of internal FBI reports and communiqués made during the first hours
after the bombing. Throughout the depositions, every FBI agent and OPD
officer involved in this case denied under oath that there had been any
investigation of Judi, Darryl or Earth First! prior to the bombing. Yet
the passages ordered disclosed by the court show them characterizing Earth
First! as suspected of terrorist activities, and stating that Darryl and
Judi were already known to the FBI and were the "subjects of an FBI investigation
in the terrorist field."

The evidence that raises the most
serious questions about the extent of FBI involvement in the bombing case
is the FBI's "THERMCON" file. The San Francisco FBI records of the THERMCON
case, the FBI sting operation targeting Arizona Earth First! and EF! founder
Dave Foreman, are key to the Oakland bombing case. Not only does it chronicle
an active FBI undercover operation against EF! at the time of the bombing,
THERMCON was a concerted and deliberate plot by the FBI to connect EF!
with explosives in order to discredit the movement.

Most disturbing about the THERMCON
file is what isn't there. Where the documents from February through May
of 1990 should be, there is a page that reads simply, "Serials 141-159
were missing from the file when it was processed." The next document in
the file is dated June 1990, one month after the bombing.

RELATED DOCUMENTS

This article was part of the November
1997 mailing from the Redwood Summer Justice Project. Read the Bombing
Case Update and the letter that
accompanied it.

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